Strategic Plan
Mission
The Libraries are at the center of academic life at Michigan State University, providing expertise, collections, resources, and infrastructure for learning, discovery, and creation. As part of MSU’s land-grant identity and mission, we collaborate in research, teaching, and learning in our local and global communities.
Vision
The Libraries promote equal access to information and spaces for all. We lead meaningful initiatives that foster access, opportunity, and excellence. We work in a culture of transparency, experimentation, and growth.
Core Values
User Engagement
We place users at the forefront of our work. We engage with and learn from our users and adapt to meet their evolving needs.
Inclusivity
We advance access, opportunity, excellence, and accessibility in our workplace and in the services and resources we offer. We provide welcoming spaces where everyone can engage, work, discover, and create.
Staff Empowerment
We trust each other to do our best work. We celebrate and create opportunities for growth, experimentation, and feedback. We cultivate respect, open communication, and connection. We facilitate and lead programs that foster community engagement and staff morale.
Partnership
We invest in collaborative relationships. We actively cultivate connections with mutual respect by sharing our expertise and valuing all contributions.
Expertise
We are leaders in our field. We use our dynamic skills, collections, resources, and knowledge to help our community. We are approachable, informed, and engaged in our work.
Stewardship
We are responsible caretakers of our collections, spaces, and other resources. We recognize the power of information collection and description. We consider the impact of our work on creators, researchers, and communities. We are committed to protecting intellectual freedom and privacy rights. We strive to adopt sustainability principles throughout our practice.
Strategic Directions
- Revitalize our physical spaces
- Optimize our digital spaces
- Connect people, services, and resources
- Increase our visibility and presence in the MSU community, statewide, nationally, and globally
- Cultivate a climate of safety, empathy, and respect
- Create, refine, and maintain inclusive and accessible spaces, resources, and services sustainably
- Represent multiple perspectives in collections, services, and descriptive practices that provide context and reflect the many communities served by MSU.
- Enhance professional excellence through recruitment and retention efforts in alignment with MSU's land grant mission
- Empower staff and supervisors with quality training, tools, resources, and spaces
- Encourage experimentation, feedback, and change; expect and learn from failures
- Make decisions based on shared dialogue and applicable data
- Expand transparent communication, policies, procedures, and shared documentation
- Promote opportunities for connections across the Libraries
- Recruit and retain a vibrant Libraries workforce
- Strengthen teaching, learning, curricular partnerships, and engagement across campus through coordinated and strategic efforts
- Advance pedagogical innovations to increase research and critical thinking skills
- Create physical and virtual spaces for a variety of learning needs
- Prioritize the creation and adoption of open and affordable course content to support student success
- Build collections that support the curriculum
- Foster critical engagement with changing modes of work and learning
- Contribute to and advance the university's research goals
- Contribute expertise to evolving research and scholarly activities as creators, partners, consultants, and publishers
- Build collections and infrastructure to support specialized research
- Lead strategies for open access and scholarly communication
- Improve discovery of collections
- Steward and provide access to the historical record of and about Michigan State University with practices grounded in an ethic of care and library and archival core values